As my son Tony so astutely put it, "Didi Gregorius cost the Indians the ALDS, not Trump."
But this is Newsweek, so you know what they're going to do. Indians pitcher Trevor Bauer, who did not pitch well in Game 4 in New York, is a Trump supporter. You see the cause and effect, right? Oh, you don't, because that's completely ridiculous?
Well of course, but Newsweek's gonna Newsweek, and boy did they:
During that Game 4 where he was yanked so early on, Deadspin noticed that Bauer might not have had his eyes completely on the game. Bauer started blocking people, the website reported—including the author of the piece, Barry Petchesky. Bauer was apparently irked—in the middle of the most important baseball game of his season—because people kept retweeting some of his old pro-Donald-Trump posts.
Oh yes—Bauer is a supporter of the president. A tweetstorm from February of this year was memorable for Bauer claiming that “almost all” of his Indians teammates support Trump. Another tweet from the same day apparently invited a user to kill himself. Bauer’s meltdown was chronicled in this Uproxx piece. It’s something, alright.
Bauer apparently started blocking after he was pulled from the game. The Indians lost because he pitched badly, not because he likes Trump. They lost because Kluber couldn’t give them two games on a par with his regular-season form. Twitter blockathons are a tiny symptom of the malaise that froze the Indians this week, not the cause. But they probably didn’t help, either.
How exactly you twist yourself into enough of a pretzel to come up with this one I will never know.
Does anyone remember when Newsweek was actually a pretty respectable print news weekly? I'm going back a few decades, of course, but Time and Newsweek were considered must-reads if you wanted to know what was going on not only in Washington, but across the country and throughout the world. Time has become a very sad shadow of its former self, but at least it still maintains some semblance of seriousness in its work - if not much.
Newsweek? It's become a total joke, reduced to absurdity like this.
By the way, if Trevor Bauer's problem was people retweeting his pro-Trump tweets, then would someone like to explain what Corey Kluber's problem was? Did he support Hillary? Maybe he's a disappointed Bernie Bro and he still hasn't gotten over what happened in the primaries last year.
Or maybe he just pitched poorly in both his playoff starts, putting the Indians behind early and, in the case of Game 5, never really giving them a chance to catch up. Dolts like Newsweek may want to make everything about politics but sometimes in baseball the other guys are just better than you. As good as the Indians were during that 22-game winning streak, the Yankees were the ones to rise to the occasion this week.
This Tiger fan is shedding no tears for the Indians, and eagerly awaits Justin Verlander's next opportunity to dominate the Yankees in the ALCS. Ah, the memories.
